Nervous Ned wrote:
I've never had one before but had a sharp pain in lower right leg during some fast mile repeats 2 days ago. Stopped workout short at 4 reps as pain occurred in 4th. Cooldown was fine, no pain. But periodically at work, walking around, I feel some soreness. Took yesterday off and will try running easy again today.
Please share your experiences for lower leg stress fractures and distinction between shin splints or other injuries. Thanks a lot.
In some sense it does not matter. Sharp pain on the bone in your lower leg is (essentially) always what is now called a "bone stress injury." These injuries exist on a spectrum. On one end, you have asymptomatic areas of low bone density that only show up on MRIs and don't even cause any pain (found in 43% of college distance runners in one study); in the middle, you have mild to moderate cases of "shin splints," more properly referred to as medial tibial stress syndrome, and on the far end of the spectrum you have stress reactions and stress fractures of various severity.
The point is that it doesn't matter whether it's "shin splints" or a stress fracture; the approach is the same:
1) If you have pain walking around, you need to be in a boot or on crutches until you can walk and go about daily life pain-free. Obviously you also need to stop running.
2) After 5-7 days of walking/going about life pain-free without crutches or a boot, you can start up with some running again, using pain or lack thereof as a guide for whether you can progress with your return-to-running plan.
There's an easy flowchart you can follow (plus more details) in this article:
http://www.runningwritings.com/2015/04/the-bone-stress-injury-model-new-way-to.htmlYou may find the various return-to-running plans to be helpful too.
The old way of dichotomous thinking. e.g. "stress fracture = 6 weeks in the boot, no exceptions; shin splints = just run through it and stretch" is wrong.